Don't Look Up

Agree with all your points.

It's possible I might have missed these, but they're also major considerations with COVID:

1. It causes scarring of tissue, especially heart tissue. That's why COVID sufferers often had severe blood clots in their bloodstream. Scarring of the heart increases risk of heart attacks, but there's obviously not much data on by how much, from COVID. Yet.

2. It causes brain damage in all who have been infected. Again, we have very little idea of how much, but from what I've read, there may be an increased risk of strokes in later life.

3. Viral load is known to cause fossil viruses in DNA to reactivate silenced portions. This can lead to cancer. Viral load has also been linked to multiple sclerosis and chronic fatigue, but it's possible COVID was the wrong sort of virus. These things can take decades to develop.

I would expect a drop in life expectancy, sometimes in the 2040-2050 timeframe, from life-shortening damage from COVID, but the probability depends on how much damage even mild sufferers sustained and what medicine can do to mitigate it by then. The first, as far as I know, has not been looked at nearly as much as long COVID has - which is fair. The second is obviously unknowable.

I'm hoping I'm being overly anxious, my worry is that I might not be anxious enough.

This is why I believe companies should reserve a percentage of dividends to be given to employees. To encourage employees to work to make the company more profitable as they see a return on their work. If the company does not issue dividends, the employees do not receive them, but if they do they must receive them. The same should go for any other form of shareholder or executive compensation/remuneration because I know they'll just find a new way to avoid paying people.

However this is somehow considered communist and instantly dismissed by corporate bootlickers.

The problem is not so easy because you're not always aware of these things before buying the product, you are not given a set date for the shut down either. When you buy a time limited product, you're given at least an estimate of how long the product will keep working for ("disposable" is considered such).

This is one reason game publishers and extortion companies like Denuvo are getting upset at Steam. The little orange/yellow box that says "this game is limited to 5 activations" or "this game requires an internet connection", so on and so forth are really upsetting them as a few people are reading these and thinking... Yarrrr, if they're going to treat me this way I may as well not buy it.

In the US you might be correct as the US is corrupt as hell and run by the corporations, however in the rest of the world this is very much a matter for consumer law and long past time that it was addressed in said law.

Fortunately this is being pursued in the EU and UK where people have these pesky things called "consumer rights". That a product you pay for must be fit for purpose according to the UK Consumer Rights act of 2015. This means it must continue to perform it's function and seeing as software doesn't degrade, it should continue to do so indefinitely.

"Local demand" means "give us more tax money".

It's "demand" as in "I demand more danegeld".

Trump supporters are a special kind of special. It's literally in the post title.

I mean they're so special if they made a school bus for them it'd need to be so short I'm not even sure it'll be Plank length.

If it started asking me to put a tablespoon of salt, or cayenne pepper or grated cheese into a recipe for 8 banana muffins, I'd be questioning it.

Good to know, if I need a spare I'll just crack that open.

This.

Like so many other game to tv series it started strong but then turned to crap. The first 2-3 eps were good, action combined with story... after the 4th it went downhill (yeah, I get you have a character episode as a filler). Far too much talking and crying. The turning point for me was episode 6 (I think), escaping from Kansas city... He clearly had the infinite ammo cheat on because we never saw him reload that rifle and he never stopped firing long enough either. A bolt action rifle holds what, 5, maybe 10 rounds at a stretch in an internal magazine.

I only watched it because I was on a long flight (London to Toronto) and it was pretty much the only thing I hadn't seen. I'm not rushing off to watch season 2.

Not played the game, not really interested in it now.

I have given up searching for recipes using regular search engines because of this.
If I ask Google for a banana muffin recipe, the amount of waffle you have to wade through before you get to the recipe is incredible.

Now I just ask ChatGPT "Banana muffin recipe"
and get a nice concise result without all the extra fluff.
I may have previously asked for results "without all the bullshit" and as a result ChatGPT seems to know I want concise recipes.

So far the recipes seem to be reasonable, without adding in weird ingredients. It's also trivial to ask for the recipe in metric measurements or for a particular final quantity, say, for 8 muffins.

The only thing I worry about is that the query might be using more energy than the muffins take to cook, but when I asked about that, it estimated it took about 0.00048 kwh for the three queries I made (I asked for imperial and metric versions, as well as for a particular batch size)

thing is, rural hospitals budget out far enough in advance that they're gonna start closing *now* over the cuts to medicaid, not after the midterms. similar is true for health care centers looking to break ground now, those guys are gonna walk

I think soon, games will be one of the things Americans, young or otherwise can only dream about having the money for.

I mean dreaming between avoiding the ICE patrols.

I'm a member of the glorious PCGMR.

1. Games have never been so cheap. I mean I picked up Stalker2, Schedule 1 and Aviassembly off the steam sales for £50. Might go back for Space Marine 2.
2. Games have been digital for ages. The fact the PC doesn't depend on a healthy used game market to sell new games is one of the reasons they're cheaper.

It's just that consoles are becoming expensive, or more accurately, console users are now figuring out they're expensive. Consoles have always been expensive but hidden it in a lower up front cost for the console. With the latest PS release being more expensive than an entry level gaming laptop and games are more expensive and you have to pay for online services and you're locked in... It seems to be dawning on people that console gaming isn't cheap.

PC gaming is the opposite, expensive cost of entry but it's all savings from there on in. Especially if your patient, more games, more stores to choose from, things go on sale sooner and more often, a thriving indie scene (Aviassembly mentioned earlier is a small game made by one guy, a Dutch guy I believe), no pay to play online. This is all before the benefits like mods, being able to update games in the background, better peripherals, graphics, so on and so forth.

Even console exclusives aren't exclusive any more given how many are now on PC. I knew the foray into trying to make PC games exclusive would end in tears (and it ended years ago, everyone figured out that exclusivity only prevents you from selling copies) but I didn't expect it to end console exclusivity, they've got you by the short and curlies and they know it.

At the risk of debunking your anti-labour rant, the big issue with undersea fibre optic cabling is less sabotage and more stupidity and greed. The biggest problem are anchors being dragged over cables, ships are not supposed to anchor near cables but do so anyway because they're not paying attention or just don't care. This provides ample camouflage for the smaller amount of deliberate sabotage attempts.

If you're that concerned about copper theft, you really should have thought about that before voting Tory and Brexit, both of which have seen huge amounts of funding and capability stripped away from the UK's police forces. Boris got his water cannons that have never been used though. I'm sure that was totally worth the cost.